• What is Microsoft Fabric? (Power BI + Synapse + DW + DataLake + ML)

    What Is Microsoft Fabric

    At today’s Build conference, Microsoft announced Fabric. What is this? In simple terms, think of taking Synapse Analytics, Data Warehousing, Data Lakes, Data Factory, Spark Notebooks and Machine Learning, and bring them all together into Power BI. This is underpinned by Microsoft OneLake, a high performance scalable data lake storage layer, supporting all of the above. OneLake is, as the name implies, one data lake that can be used across…

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  • Change the Compatibility Level of a Power BI report

    A number of new features in Power BI are limited to newer Power BI datasets, which Microsoft track through the use of Compatibility Levels. 1500+ for SQL Server 2019 compatibility 1400+ for SQL Server 2017 compatibility 1200+ for SQL Server 2016 compatibility If you want to, for example, connect to the xmla endpoint of the dataset from SQL Server Management Studio, then you need level 1500 or greater. If it’s lower you’ll get the…

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  • Speaking at Data Platform Summit

    I’m delighted to have been selected to speak at the Data Platform Summit (DPS), a virtual conference from 2nd to 4th December 2020, with Data, Analytics and Machine Learning content around the clock for a global audience. I’ll be presenting a session on “Machine Learning in Power BI”, exploring various methods of accessing Machine Learning functionality within the Power BI world, including text analytics, prediction…

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  • Regular Expression to get tables from SQL query

    If you’ve not come across regular expressions (RegEx) before then you’re missing out, they’re an incredibly powerful tool for matching, extracting or validating patterns of text. I had a use case this week where I needed to take a SQL query, and quickly identify every table or view that was used in the query. RegEx to the rescue! (?<=((FROM[ \n\r]+)|(JOIN[ \n\r]+)|(APPLY[…

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  • Power BI Databricks Spark connection error

    When querying data from Azure Databricks (spark) into Power BI you may encounter an error: “ODBC:ERROR [HY000] [Microsoft][Hardy] (100) The host and port specified for the connection do not seem to belong to a Spark server. Please check your configuration.“ This is usually caused by trying to connect to a ‘Standard’ Databricks instance, but Power BI (and ODBC in general) can only connect to Databricks using a…

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  • Capturing Insert and Update Counts from Merge

    This post shows hows how you can capture and store the number of records inserted, updated or deleted from a T-SQL Merge statement. This is in response to a question on an earlier post about using Merge to load SCDs in a Data Warehouse. You can achieve this by using the OUTPUT clause of a merge statement, including the $Action column that OUTPUT returns. The basic syntax is: INSERT INTO XXXX SELECT [Action] FROM ( MERGE XXXX AS Target USING XXXX…

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  • Power BI Sentinel

    We all know and love Power BI, because of it’s power and ease of use, there’s a good reason why it’s number 1 in the Gartner Quadrant. But how to we avoid ‘Power BI Hell’, the new version of our old nemesis ‘Excel Hell’? How do we keep track of which data sources are being used by which datasets and reports? How to we perform an impact assessment of updating/changing a dataset? What happens if someone…

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  • SSAS Tabular Deployment Wizard fails Newtonsoft.Json error

    The Scenario Deploying an Analysis Services Tabular model to SSAS Azure using the Analysis Services Deployment Wizard. Both Visual Studio 2017 & SQL Server 2017 installed on the client. Try and click on the ellipses to change the data source connection string or impersonation information results in a Newtonsoft.json error: “Could not load file or assembly ‘Newtonsoft.Json, Version 6.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, ……”…

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  • More Frogs join the FrogPlex!

    June has been a very busy month for us at the FrogPlex – Firstly Lukasz joined the team, to help work on our clients’ business intelligence projects, and also to expand our Machine Learning and Advanced Analytics capability. In his first month he’s already been tackling projects in SSIS, Data Lake Analytics, building customer churn models in R, as well as providing support to our existing customers. A very warm welcome to the…

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  • Lookups and If Conditions in Azure Data Factory v2 (ADFv2)

    Azure Data Factory v2 (ADFv2) has some significant improvements over v1, and we now consider ADF as a viable platform for most of our cloud based projects. But things aren’t always as straightforward as they could be. I’m sure this will improve over time, but don’t let that stop you from getting started now. This post provides a walk through of using the ‘Lookup’ and ‘If Condition’ activities to do some…

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